Breaking Light: part one

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i

 

It is late. It is early.

 

3 a.m. Too tired to sleep,

awake-dreaming.

Feeling the house breathe around me,

its unfamiliar night sounds, a

strange landing.

The pores of my skin

are a million unblinking eyes.

You have set me off

like a spinning top.

Made my head explode with light.

 

As you lie next to me,

I listen to the white noise

of rain on your attic windows,

whispers in the static.

 

Even in the city I feel Her near.

 

Lady Autumn,

I can hear you

washing your long russet hair,

a weeping willow sifting the wind.

The rivulets reveal its lustre,

like a wave-wet pebble on the beach –

your colours unveiled, a whole paintbox.

 

Everything becomes more beautiful

the more it lets go –

the more it releases its inner life.

The promise of frost brings

the spectrum to the surface –

the colours the light let go of.

We see what isn’t absorbed.

A leaf, in Spring, not-green, becomes

in Autumn, not-red.

 

What the world sees is

what we cannot contain inside us; it

spills out –

breaking light,

the way love splits us open.

 

Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring 2010

Continued tomorrow

First published in Soul of the Earth (Awen 2010) and soon to be featured in the forthcoming Silver Branch: bardic poems by Kevan Manwaring (Awen 2017).

https://www.awenpublications.co.uk/